Anti-immigrant argument about the learning of English is false

One of the arguments against the presence of undocumented and even documented immigrants in the United States involves the passionate and emotional issue of language: English, that is, and what some believe is an unwillingness to learn it.

The advocates who teach them say that argument is false. While some immigrants may never learn the English language for various reasons, including opportunity and age, many more seek out classes that are popular and crowded. Critics of the language argument also say, with some authority, that their children, whether born in the United States or not, become proficient in English.

In San Antonio, various profit and nonprofit organizations offer instruction. Academia America, for example, helps prepare immigrants for their citizenship tests, offering classes in English and U.S. history.

Many more immigrants go unserved, however.

A New York Times story today addresses the issue. As its public libraries face major cuts, librarian Adriana Blancarte-Hayward, manager of the New Dorp branch library in Staten Island, illustrates the need. She was once one of those who walked in the door of the same branch to take an English class.

The New York Public Library system, Queens and Brooklyn Public Libraries, the New York City Department of Education, the City University of New York and various nonprofit community groups offer English-language classes, the story says, yet “the need for instruction in English still seems to outpace the supply.”

“Typically, many more people show up than there are spots available, and hundreds have to be turned away,” the story says. “Spots are distributed by a lottery.”

As New York libraries face a $37 million budget cut, even fewer people may be able to take classes next year.

For those who argue that their great-grandparents learned English on their own or without help, scholars beg to differ, noting that new waves of immigrants, much like the old, learn and adopt English in similar patterns.

A Princeton University study found that “immigrant children embrace English just as rapidly as those who came to this country at the turn of the century. Among today’s newcomers, Italian and German have been replaced with Spanish or languages of the Pacific Rim, but the pattern is the same: By the time they finish high school, children of immigrants prefer English to their native tongues and often lose the ability to write fluently in the language of their parents.”

The lamentable loss of their parents’ or grandparents’ first language aside, the anti-immigrant argument is dulled. The desire to learn English is there, even if the opportunity doesn’t always present itself, especially given how hard immigrants work to provide for themselves and their families.

The New York library system may have to cut English classes from 117 to 48, the story says, and the number of seats from 3,000 to less than 1,300.